From the perspectives of modernists, nationalism is the ideology constructed by the macro-structural forces from above. Contrary to that, one of the new perspectives of nationalism Michael Billig‟s banal nationalism approach offers to behold nationalism as the product of routine activities, hopes, desires, assumptions, needs and interests of ordinary people. Every nation has its own national past and its own collective memories. But, there is a complex dialectic of remembering and forgetting in the banal reproduction of nationalism and nationhood. The collective remembering is simultaneously a way of collective forgetting. Whilst thousands of national flags hanging in public places constantly remind the nationhood, they are mostly unnoticed and forgotten. Since the banal reproduction of nationalism is frequently and unconsciously, it differs from the collective remembering of a national commemoration. By making use of this perspective, this study argues that everyday activities and discourses play a crucial role in construction of identity politics which constitute we against them distinction in international relations. It derives the concept of banal orientalism from the combination of Billig‟s banal nationalism and Edward Said‟s orientalism. Orientalism refers the special place of the Orient and the Oriental in European Western experiences and imagination. This study reveals the images which have formed mindlessly the ways of thinking and seeing of Europeans about Turks for the centuries. With this aim, this article investigates the literal and artistic literature about the everyday life of Turks, it maps out the place of Turkishness and Turkish identity in European imagination in the times of the Ottomans. As a result of this investigation, by revealing contradictory and prejudiced expressions in the collective memory of Europe, it shows that taken for granted approaches to Turkish nation have served specific identity politics among Europe and Turkey in integration and exclusion relations.